Chapter Text
Kate has never been accused of piety.
She has always been a passive participant in religion, if only for her parents’ sake. Be it a temple or chapel, she lit incense, offered coin for the collection box, and bowed her head in the position of prayer, lips moving uselessly in the shape of words she barely believed.
She first prayed in a Catholic church because of Mary. Mary, her sanctified second mother, who taught her to fold her hands at her appa’s bedside when he was sick. Mary, who made a believer of her father, faithful to the bitter end, a rosary wrapped around his swollen knuckles when he slipped away. Mary, who christened Kate her daughter, who kept her promise of parenthood long after there was anyone left to hold her accountable. Long after her appa left, Mary stayed. As best she could, Mary stayed.
These days, Kate cannot step foot in a church. Not that she did much before, since the funeral. But now? Now she aches simply at the sight of them. At a mere glimpse of a proud spire atop an ancient steeple, her heart is rended, raw.
These days, Kate only ever prays to certain saints for strength or mercy or grace; innumerable intangibles that go unfulfilled. Only ever prays when she is at her wits end, hitting absolute hopelessness.
So when a priest - her priest - enters the cafe on an odd Sunday morning like a holy ghost, seven months after she last saw him, Kate has no other recourse but to whisper a silent plea to her favourite saint.
Find me some forgiveness, she pleads against tight-knit knuckles.
She stumbles upon him in September.
On an unseasonably warm and sticky Thursday afternoon, the heavens open. It is a deluge - droplets pounding against the pavement and splashing onto her calves; sliding down the sloped arms of threadbare branches to soak her back.
Huddled under the hunched canopy of a willow, Kate assesses her options, calculates her risks. She’s good at that. She’s still a ten minute walk from the cafe. Her laptop and the binder full of invoices are stuffed in a canvas tote that won’t last much longer. The street she’s on is unfortunately residential, all quaint white brick and front doors on which she cannot knock; private gardens ensconced by iron gates to which she holds no key. There is no nearby pub or bookshop or Tesco to duck into for shelter.
But behind her is a church. All yellowed stone and stained glass, a tall tower flanked by intricate spires and a slanted copper roof turned teal with the patina of time. She is standing in its yard already, taking refuge beneath its best tree and watching the lawn drown in the downpour. Just a few paces and she could be at the front door, pushing past the heavy wood and entering the dry embrace of its walls.
Though she prays every few months when the tube is outrageously delayed or her bills feel crushing or her loneliness threatens to swallow her whole, Kate has hardly entered a church since her appa’s funeral. She doesn’t need to be reminded of one of the worst days of her life. Doesn’t need to be cornered into a confession by some judgemental old man in a shapeless skirt.
All she needs today is a little shelter from the storm. And isn’t that what churches are supposedly for? Sanctuary?
She walks inside. It is empty and quiet, save for the sound of rain pattering on the glass. The ceiling is covered in finely-detailed frescoes: wide-winged angels soaring through a sea of pink and white clouds. At this height, heaven is close enough to see, too far away to touch.
At the front of the church, there is an ocean aflame: tapered candles flickering with orange light and dripping wax onto velvet runners. Their little fires dance in the gilded reflection of the reredos, carved with a depiction of the Pietà.
Kate could simply sit in a pew. Scroll on her phone and wait for the storm to pass. But there’s a force that guides her to walk down the aisle, beckons her to stand before the altar. To strike a match and whisper a prayer for all the things she’s lost or forgotten.
She finds an unlit candle. Catches its wick on a friendly flame. Closes her eyes and lets a prayer pass through her lips.
Find me courage.
Find me comfort.
Find me -
“Hi.”
She jumps at the sound of an unfamiliar voice and a hand on her shoulder.
“Christ!” Kate shouts, the exclamation echoing off the stone walls.
“No, just a messenger.”
She turns to find a priest with a pleasing smile, hands raised in feeble apology.
“Sorry to startle you,” he says. “It’s just that you have a, um …”
He returns his hand to her shoulder slowly, silently. She shivers at the graze of his fingers over the damp fabric of her blouse, at the faint fan of his breath against her brow as he steps closer. She realises in that moment that her white cotton shirt is clinging to her skin, that this man can see through it entirely. That a priest’s palm is skimming over the soaked strap of her bra.
Gently, he plucks at her rain-battered button-down and presents an orange leaf, held between his thumb and forefinger.
“You had a leaf.”
It flutters from his fingertips to the floor. Neither move to retrieve it.
“Ah.”
The sound she makes is less an acknowledgement than a catch-breath, but the priest treats it as a complete sentence, a catalyst for conversation.
“Anthony.”
A wry smile crosses her face. Of course he shares a name with the saint she seeks most.
Now that she’s no longer frightened and blaspheming, Kate can assess him properly. He’s a soft smile made of sharp teeth. Clean-shaven cheeks indented with the faint curve of dimples. A defined jaw marked by a few moles. His chestnut hair is rumpled, as if he has just run a hand through it, and his eyes hold something slightly provocative, as if he’s either humoured or hungry. Both are starkly at odds with his crisp collar and wrinkle-free cassock. He’s a paradox, this priest.
He’s handsome, to put it plainly. More than handsome, to put it honestly.
Father, son, and holy shit - he’s hot.
He laughs a little, like he can hear what’s inside her head. It’s her turn to talk, she realises.
“Kate.”
The priest - Anthony - extends a hand in greeting and she takes it. She shouldn’t feel so breathless at a simple touch, at the curl of a stranger’s fingertips over her skin or the cool bite of his signet ring on her palm. But she does. He meets her eyes as he holds her hand. There is something akin to want in his gaze, though that cannot be correct.
Priests should not want. Kate should not want a priest.
He drops her hand like it burns. Never mind that it actually does. Her flesh is still on fire when he speaks again.
“Kate.” He says her name like it's a novelty. “You know, I feel like I know you.”
“I’m sure you say that to all the parishioners,” she remarks drily. Never mind that she feels like she knows him too.
Standing here with him, exchanging spare touches, feels like slipping into an old habit. Something at once familiar and forgotten, guided by muscle memory alone. Like sticking a cigarette between her teeth and inhaling on instinct as the paper ignites. Knowing to exhale when that prickling warmth rushes down her throat and spreads through her chest.
“Can’t say I do, actually. Just started here this month.” He shrugs, a bit of juvenile pride to the gesture. “Too soon to recognise anyone.”
“Well. We’ve never met.” She tucks a few drying curls behind her ear, suddenly rather aware of her own appearance. “I don’t come to this parish. Any parish, really.”
“A parish isn’t really a church,” he replies. His eyes are fixed on her fingertips, still threaded with her hair.
“Are all priests this pedantic?”
“No, just this one.” He lifts a brow and runs a hand through his own hair, further ruining the curls. “So, Kate. You don’t come to any church or parish or congregation or what have you.”
“No.” She answers a little stiffly, in no mood to entertain any attempts at evangelism - even those of a really fucking fit priest.
“But you did today.” He tips his head a little curiously.
“I just needed a good place to hide.”
“Well,” he smiles, “there’s no hiding here.”
“Because God sees all?” Kate quips.
“Mostly because I’m a bit of a lurker,” he admits, scratching at his neck. “But yeah, that too.”
Though she probably shouldn’t, Kate laughs at that, can’t help the sound from slipping out at his flippancy. His honesty.
Anthony smiles at the noise, like he’s hearing the peal of silver bells on a spring morning.
“I’m glad I found you,” he says, too genuine for her taste.
A long pause stretches between them. Maybe it’s because she is supposed to say she is glad too. Maybe it’s because he regrets the admission.
“Do you - do you want to stay for a chat?” The question comes spontaneously, like he’s surprised himself by asking. He watches the way she hesitates, suspects it might be some covert crack at forcing her into confession or conversion. “Not here. In the rectory. We can have a pot of tea. Nothing more than that.”
She wrinkles her nose on instinct at the thought of choking down the English’s poor excuse for tea.
“I’m alright, thanks.”
“Right. I’ll be off.” Anthony nods, pink-cheeked and muttering to himself. “Fuck me, then.”
Kate exhales a sharp, shocked laugh.
“Sorry, are we not supposed to swear?” He grins and it’s something beautiful to behold.
“I actually find profanity rather befitting of the priesthood.”
“If I say ‘fuck’ again, will you stay?”
Kate looks at him consideringly, warmth blooming in her cheeks at the sound of a second curse rough on his tongue. But the rain is slowing now; droplets dancing lighter on the rooftop. Her shift started ten minutes ago. She really ought to be going. Besides, what good will pining over a priest do her? It is not a shrewd thing, that.
“Tempting,” she tells him. “But I shouldn’t.”
“I understand. That might be wise.” He nods and tucks his hands behind his back in deference, adopting a polite distance in his posture.
Kate doesn’t like polite. Doesn’t like distant. Doesn’t like the disappointment evident in his voice or swooping in her stomach.
“How about a rain check?” she offers unwisely.
He glances between her and the stained glass, where raindrops are drying against the pane. A soft streak of sunlight comes through the window, casting his face in shades of purple and gold.
“A rain check sounds lovely.”
Everything he says sounds rather lovely, she thinks.
“Good,” Kate nods, adjusting the strap of her bag against her shoulder.
“Before you go -” He reaches out to halt her hand over the strap, to stop her from leaving him too soon. “I believe I interrupted your prayer. May I finish it with you?”
Even though she wouldn’t even know where to begin a new prayer, Kate nods. A few more minutes of one-sided flirting can’t harm her.
He lights a candle and then sits in a pew, inviting her to join him. As though he knows she is without words, Anthony supplies them, fingers laced and eyes falling shut with an enviable ease.
Kate sneaks a peek as he begins praying, admiring his jaw and the shape of his lips as they form a fresh petition.
“Dear God …”
Dear God. She fancies a priest.
Between their prayer and a long, lingering goodbye, the priest gives her his number. “For that rain check. Or just … if you ever need someone to talk to.”
She doesn’t, really. Not when there’s Alice and Sophie, who she tells over wine -
“I’ve met somebody.”
“What?”
“When?”
“A few days ago. Thursday.” Kate spins the stem of her wine glass, slightly aware that she is tipsy: enough to open her mouth, but not enough to share the depth of her own delusion. “I, uh, really fancy him.”
She lifts her glass of Syrah to her lips and knocks back its contents in one go. Why the fuck did she bring this up?
“That’s amazing.” Sophie squeezes her arm. “What’s he like?”
“Very … dedicated. Clever. Reads a lot.” Though it’s really just the one book. “Incredibly fit.”
“What’s he do?” Alice asks.
She stares for a long moment at the dregs in her glass and decides she’s earned a refill.
“Kate,” Alice intones flatly.
Best to rip the bandage, then.
“He’s a priest.”
“You’re joking.”
“Swear to God.”
“Catholic?” Alice’s eyebrows have disappeared into her hairline.
“Like a priest priest. With the -” Sophie gestures at her neck, finger curving like a collar.
“Yes and yes.”
“Christ,” Alice groans.
“That’s his boss,” Kate corrects. “His name is Anthony.”
She can tell by the looks on her friends’ faces that they’re teetering between mildly and moderately concerned. It was just a joke - just a passing comment about the first person who’s made her blood sing in ages - but now the moment’s been made into something more serious. She feels exposed, no longer impenetrable as she’d like to be. It was a mistake to talk about him, to take a moment that was solely hers and share it.
“So, did the two of you …”
“Tell us you haven’t actually -”
“No,” Kate huffs. “Anthony and I haven’t - It was nothing.” Her veins are beginning to warm, a sensation she attributes to the last glass of wine, though maybe it’s from the mere thought of him, the shape of his name in her mouth.
She ought to stay away from him. She ought to deny her worst impulses here. Ought to do the wise thing, as she’s always aimed to do.
She sends a text.
Hello Father.
He invites her to the rectory for tea.
This time she accepts.
This is because she’s a right idiot, despite her best intentions. The path to hell is paved with those, she’s heard.
The cottage is a cosy spot. Though it lacks the Gothic grandeur of the church, much of the original Georgian detailing remains intact. It’s all exposed brick and fan windows; sturdy columns and intricate cornices to compensate for the close quarters. She likes the simplicity here. Feels a certain comfort in it.
Leaning back against the countertop, Kate watches Anthony attempt to light the stove for their tea. Though she’s only met him once, it feels odd to see him out of uniform. In a formless wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a snug pair of Levi’s, he almost looks normal. Like a man who might sleep through mass on Sunday, rather than lead it.
The muscles in his forearms jump as his fingers fiddle with the range and Kate bites her lip until it blanches. It’s illogical how attractive she finds him, in spite of his absolute uselessness in the kitchen. Odd too is her comfort; how easy she finds it all, being here with him. There’s that same flush of familiarity she felt upon their first meeting in the church. That same sense of knowing; of being known before a word was spoken.
“It’s finicky,” he explains after several minutes of war waged with the appliance.
“You could always just put the electric kettle on.”
He scoffs, eyeing the object as though it has caused some great offence. “I can light a stove. It’s just that the gas is sometimes -” his brow furrows as he turns the knob, confused by the constant clicking. “See, there should be a flame.”
“That is how stoves work,” she says sagely.
“I’m aware of how they ought to work, but this one isn’t - ”
“Step aside, Father.”
Taking pity on the priest, Kate bumps him away from the range with her hip and produces a lighter from her jacket pocket. The burner bursts with heat, blue flames licking at the kettle.
He looks at her like she’s nothing short of a miracle.
Ten minutes later, once the water has boiled and the leaves have steeped and they’ve danced deliberately around the boundary that delineates pleasantries from impropriety, Kate and Anthony sit at the kitchen table for tea.
He pours her a cup, the gesture gentlemanly and a little eager. At the scent, Kate’s lip curls into a mild grimace and she remembers why she rejected his invitation in the first place.
Blasted English tea.
“Cheers.” He taps his cup against hers.
“Cheers.”
He watches her over the rim of his cup as he drinks, a single eyebrow raised in anticipation. He has a beautiful brow, she thinks.
A mirror, Kate lifts her cup and sips. She wrinkles her nose as the tea hits her tongue. It is truly God-awful. A waste of leaves and water.
His lips twitch with curiosity.
“What?” she asks, eyes narrowing.
“Nothing,” he says. His lips twitch again as he sips, amused.
She follows suit and sips, nose scrunching.
“There’s that face again.”
“What face?” She sips again at her tea.
“That one,” he says. “You hate it.”
“I do not,” she says firmly, consonants crisp.
She lifts the cup to her mouth again, but Anthony’s hand covers it. His thumb brushes the edge of the white porcelain, waxy and pink from her lipstick. She’d like to feel his digit pressed to her mouth, let him leave fingerprints on the kitchen table that match the colour of her lips.
“Why are you lying, Kate?” he asks.
“Sorry,” she winces, thinking of all the vague thou shalt nots by which she never bothered to abide. Lying is certainly one of them. “I’ll try to sin a little less in front of you.”
“I don’t give a shit about that,” he says, shaking his head.
There’s the third commandment kicked to the curb then.
“Shouldn’t you?” she says quickly.
“Maybe? Though I don’t see much purpose in punishing someone for politeness.” His countenance turns curious. “Is that what you want?”
Kate hardly knows, can hardly say what she wants.
“You ask an awful lot of questions.”
“I’ve heard that’s what you do when you’re trying to get to know someone, Kate.”
It’s unsettling how often he uses her name. How much she likes hearing it. She doesn’t know if it’s a trick all priests use, the relaxed repetition of one’s name to talk a person into prayer or confession or a terrible cup of tea. Well, she doesn’t want a revelation. He wouldn’t like to know what unholy thoughts are inside her head.
“That’s good of you, Father.”
The priest’s tongue sticks itself between his teeth, displaying the barest hint of a vulpine smile. His eyes drag over her face like he can tell what she is doing by refusing to use his name.
“I’ll be honest with you, Kate,” he says finally. “And then maybe you can be honest with me.”
Not a command, but a challenge. She nods.
“There is no Godly reason for me to invite you here.” His gaze is penetrating, unwavering as he says it. She searches his eyes for some evidence of artifice. There is none. There is nothing but heat. “From the moment I saw you in that church, I thought … I thought I would have wasted the entire afternoon talking to you, if you’d let me.”
She swallows. There is no mistaking his expression for anything other than absolute sincerity.
“Why did you give me your number?” she asks, a little breathless.
“Because I wanted to see you again. Talk to you. Get to know you.”
And though he hasn’t said it, won’t, she has a hunch he is speaking in the Biblical sense.
“Even though we can’t … ” Kate has performed the requisite Google searches, after she fired off that first foolish text. All priests take a vow of celibacy. This one included.
“It’s illogical, I know.”
“Highly.”
“But my life is devoted to the pursuit of an improbable belief,” he reminds her. “Some of the most illogical callings are the ones I prefer to answer.”
The words spark in her like hot iron to steel. A strike followed by a flinch, the sting of his attraction to her being an illogical calling. But then - so is hers.
“You think your own god is an improbability?”
“Of course I do,” he says. “Faith requires trust without evidence. If everything was proven, probable, certain - there would be no need for me to believe.” When he looks at her, she can tell that he is nothing more than a man. Not a priest but a person, trying so very intently to hold on to something impalpable. “I don’t know anything, except for what I hope is true. What I want to believe in. But I have to walk hand-in-hand with doubt.”
“Does it bother you that I don’t really believe it?” Kate lays her hand flat on the table. Gouges at the varnish with her thumbnail and avoids his eyes. “That I don’t want to?”
“No, it doesn’t.” His own hand inches across the table top, thumb grazing the curve of her own and stilling her assault on the lacquer. “I think it’s wonderful that you find some comfort in that. In a way, I envy your certainty. Your disbelief. It seems easier.”
“I don’t know if it is,” she tells him softly.
What she wouldn’t give to believe her appa is somewhere else. That she might see him again, healthy and whole. Her amma, too. That they might be anything more than bones, anywhere but buried in the dirt. But she can’t. It kills her that she can’t.
“Maybe not,” he nods. He isn’t here to convince her.
“Maybe not,” she repeats.
“So, Kate.”
“Anthony.”
He smiles at the sound of his name, its first pass over her tongue. “Why did you use my number?”
Kate returns his smile, coy enough to cover what feels like naked attraction.
“I’ve been looking for a father figure,” she quips.
“Oh, come on.” He rolls his eyes, unimpressed. “We had a deal.”
“I like emotionally unavailable men?” she tries.
“A vow of celibacy isn’t the same as emotional unavailability,” he argues. Though they are not the same, one does not negate the other. “I just … I want to know you, Kate.”
“Well.” She draws out the word, weighs her options with a single syllable. “I suppose I used your number because I want to know you, too. Anthony.”
And it is true. But there’s more to it than that. They both are smart enough to be aware of it. Foolish enough to ignore it.
“So, we’ll get to know each other, then.”
“Nothing more?”
“Nothing more,” he nods sharply. Certainly.
“Mighty optimistic of you.” Idiotic, she wants to say.
“Is that such a terrible thing to be?”
“Just don’t make me an optimist.” She shakes her head. “That’ll wreck my life.”
No good has ever come from wishing. From being unwise enough to want.
“Okay, then. No optimism,” he promises.
Anthony slides his fingers over her knuckles, squeezes softly so she knows to turn her palm upward. She strokes the back of his hand with her thumb as he holds it in the facsimile of a handshake, curls her fingers over his and it feels like a kind of collusion. The sealing of an agreement made with fingers crossed behind their backs. An earnest oath to lie, just a little.
“I hate English tea, by the way,” she tells him, their hands still clasped on the table. “Just … in the spirit of knowing one another.”
He grins like she’s given him a gift. And then, with sudden awareness, withdraws his hand from her grasp.
“What, ah, do you prefer?”
“Chai.”
“Well, I don’t have chai. But I do have wine.”
“I’m sure you do,” she replies, folding her hands atop the table. “You can save it for communion.”
He barks a laugh at that, equal parts aghast and amused. “I have excellent alcohol here in the rectory, thank you very much. I won’t have you nicking the communion wine.”
“Tempting,” she tells him.
And then she is not sure who is leading who as they walk into the wine cellar and find a bottle of Barolo to split between their teacups.
The next time Kate comes to the rectory, Anthony is prepared with a chilled Chianti and a small selection of cheeses. It is almost enough to feel like a date.
They sit on the sofa this time, legs curled atop the cushions and a blanket tossed precariously over their knees. There’s room for Jesus in between them, though not so much that she’d notice if He actually made an appearance. Anthony is achingly near, enough that she can count his eyelashes and catalogue his freckles.
Up close, he smells like church. The warm, inviting sort, rather than a chapel constructed of dank stone and Catholic condemnation. His scent is the remnants of incense left burning in a forgotten thurible. Dark amber and warm musk, a hint of pine and pepper. The wisped smoke that bleeds from a burnt match.
How easy it would be to close her eyes and inhale, let him inhabit her lungs for a while.
Instead she pours herself a second glass and allows herself to exhale, to speak. She tells him about her favourite friends from uni, Sophie and Alice and Will, how she manages the café owned by the latter two. That she does their bookkeeping too. She tells him that once upon a time she might have run her own cafe. That she and her appa talked endlessly of a place of their own: caffeine in the morning and cocktails in the evening, a selection of snacks all throughout the day. Chakli and chaat and chai in some cosy corner storefront.
“Why didn’t you?” he asks.
“It didn’t make sense when my appa died.” She refuses to look at him as she says it, preferring to focus on tugging a thread loose from the blanket between them. “I was in my second term at uni and my sister was young. So.”
So she took a job making espresso for uncaffeinated commuters and laminating pastry dough at four in the morning. Stopped cooking up creative recipes for a cafe that would never exist. Nothing but the basics; whatever sustenance was survivable, affordable. Picked up extra accounting classes in the afternoon and took care of Mary and Edwina in the evenings. She dedicated her entire life to the two of them. Devout and devoted was she to her miracle of a mother, to the sister who called her whole, never half. So then, all of her belonged to them.
So every dream of Kate’s died with her father. And that was alright. She was alright borrowing the Mondritches’. Resenting her reality wouldn’t alter it.
“And your mum?”
“It’s complicated,” she shrugs.
It is never easy to explain Mary, who is not her amma; her amma whose absence she was too young to understand. Neither of them able to mother her properly, when she needed it most.
“I understand complicated.”
He says it without pity or piety, but a conspiratorial kindness. A tone that suggests he does, in fact, understand.
So she tells him about her stepmum, Mary; her appa, Milan; her amma, Shivani. Tells him about the moment she lost each of them. Mostly, she tells him about the first few years after her appa’s death. When she was blindly padding, stumbling, in the pitch black of her own grief, a shroud so heavy that she could hardly see her own hand in front of her face. How her own pain felt like failure. Still does, sometimes.
It’s why she has never let anyone notice it, never exposed herself so easily until now.
Though he is God’s go-between, Anthony offers no apologies on His behalf. Nor does he tell her in soothing tones that her loss is His will. He doesn’t suggest that she ought to make any amount of peace with death or state the obvious: That sounds awful.
He doesn’t ask how she managed it. How could he, when she didn’t. To manage meant to heal. Not to grind a thumb in the bruises that bloomed for all her fumbling in the dark. Not to pack it away; to push it all down and pray it doesn’t rise like a tide that might swallow her whole.
Instead, he asks after the only thing that matters.
“How is your family now?”
Kate sighs, genuine and relieved. “They’re good. Great. Mary is back to work and Edwina is in uni. Studying history.” She smiles, thinking of her sister hunched over her textbooks, poring over scrolls in Aramaic or a piece of pottery from Ancient Greece. “She’s going to be a brilliant archivist or curator or something equally impressive.”
He hums fondly as she sings her sister’s praises, hand announcing itself gently on her sleeve.
“You’re proud of her.”
“Immensely.”
“I imagine they’re pretty proud of you, too.”
“Oh.” Her brow stitches. Unravels. “Maybe.”
Slowly, his thumb strays toward her shoulder, slips back down more sensibly to her upper arm, then settles in the soft cleft of her elbow. His touch is leaf-light, so faint she might have missed it, were she not aware of every inch of him, of every molecule that makes him.
“Losing your father …” he says carefully. “Is that why you left the faith?”
“Can’t leave what you never had,” Kate smiles wistfully. “Why did you join?”
She presses closer to his palm, hoping he will leave it there.
He does not.
His hand drops from her sleeve, quick and heavy as a branch in a summer storm; like his limb, damp and dead with rot, has been struck, severed from her body by a flash of light.
“Sorry, I -”
“No, it’s alright.” She means it. That’s just the harm of hoping. She’s used to it by now.
His fingers flex into a fist as he speaks again, knuckles pale then flushed with colour as they wind and unfurl, as the blood rushes back around the bone.
“To answer your question, I, ah, I went to seminary a few years after my father died.”
“Dad father or -” she puts her hands together in the posture of prayer, “- priest father?”
“Both, actually. My father was a Father.”
“Sounds complicated.”
He laughs, a little breath of life.
This time it is he who pours a second glass, talking about his family and his father at length. About how Edmund preached every Sunday for seven years. How he met a woman one morning at Mass and cleaved himself from the clergy, just to wed himself to her. How he lived eighteen years by her side; died by it too.
“Would you believe he still went to church every Sunday? Even after he left the cloth, he never left the faith. For a while, that didn’t make sense to me. Especially as a child.” He shakes his head, smiles a little. Like it still doesn’t. “My father would tell us that God was his first love and our mother, our family, was his last. But I wondered, you know, after our family started to grow, how he would have room to love us all the same.”
A small part of Kate tugs beneath her breastbone, snags like loose thread on a nail at the thought. She knows that little wonder, that worry, well.
“Do you know what he told me?” Anthony continues. “Just after my second sister was born, he said that his heart made room every time, for each and every one of us. I think we both found that a little miraculous.”
“And did you find that it was true?”
“I did. For me as much as him.” His smile is a faraway thing. It is the sort she imagines he bestowed on that sacred second sister.
Later, when he speaks of the worst years, the ones that followed his father’s death, he talks with too much love for one person to take.
There is the opaque mention of his mother’s depression, an allusion to late nights with Oxford mates traded for the company of a colicky baby; but Kate lets them drift away. They are but specks of dust in daylight, ignorable in order to spare his obvious discomfort. It doesn’t escape her notice, though. Doesn’t stop her from seeing his sacrifice, so similar to hers that it makes her breath catch in her throat.
All seven of his siblings (“God, you are Catholic,” she interjects) are detailed with an excess of tenderness, of duty and devotion. It is obvious that they are entirely alike in this way. Fierce in their affection and unwavering in their fealty to the people they hold dear. Obvious, too, is his capacity for care. The abundance of his adoration.
And through it all is the hagiography of his father, the memory of a man alive in the boy who so desired to take the shape of his shadow, straw spun gold in Anthony’s - or perhaps his entire family’s - remembrance.
Kate's heart wrings against her ribs, twists at the thought of him as he was then, eighteen and achingly scared. It is no wonder that he would abandon uni without second glance, would place family and faith before all else. It’s what Edmund would do.
“I can see why you followed in your father’s footsteps,” she tells him finally.
“Why’s that?”
“You’ve got a great deal of love to give. More love than eight people might be able to manage.”
“Oh.” His face shutters. “I don’t know about that.”
She moves her hand to catch on the hem of his sleeve, swipes her pinky over his own, where the cool silver of a signet ring sits. He sighs like he is starved. Like he is rarely, if ever, touched. Sighs like he craves it; like he fears it.
Bravely, she remains, bracing for him to move his hand away, to flinch.
He doesn’t.
“I think he’d be pretty proud of you.”
He swallows thickly. His face is unshuttered once more, features flickering with fondness. He pulls his hand from hers and lifts a tentative finger to tuck a curl behind her ear.
“Careful now,” he warns. “That sounds a lot like optimism.”
“I’ve never met anyone who was actually Catholic, you know. Even Mary is a bit …” Kate wavers her hand back and forth. “Most of you lot stick to Christmas and Easter.”
“Oh, sure. But there are plenty who come every week who don’t advertise it. Some even come in between services to sit and light a candle.” Anthony lifts a shoulder at her. “They’re just not fussy about it.”
“Ha.” Kate hands him a knob of ginger. “You can grate this in now.”
This Saturday they are standing over his stove, making their own masala. The counter is scattered with ingredients: pouches of cardamom pods and sticks of cinnamon; glass jars with nutmeg and cloves; a tin of Assam for which Anthony undoubtedly has overpaid.
His dedication to the task, to surprising her with chai today, is sweet. Affection blooms in her all afternoon, swelling just a little bit more with each shift of his expression. Like the way his eyes turn bright at the sight of her, wide with excitement while he leads her into the kitchen. How his ears tinge pink as he admits to a great deal of Google searches to gather the right ingredients. And now, how his brow knits with concentration when he adds the ginger or stirs small pinches of sugar into the saucepan. All of it unlocks a certain softness inside her, fondness unfurling without her permission.
As she guides him to strain the chai into their mugs, he continues talking, as though their conversation never ceased.
“It’s an incredibly difficult thing, being a person.”
“You don’t say,” Kate comments drily.
“Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” The saucepan is empty but his eyes are on the sieve, its fine-woven mesh heavy with a handful of soggy star anise and black tea that bloomed at a boil, withers now. “I think that we do the best we can to survive being human. All the hurt that comes with it.” His voice is fine-sifted, whisper-soft. “I’m not sure I could imagine a world without the Church. Without a candle to light when it’s all too much to bear.”
Not for the first time, Kate wishes she could imagine a world where the Church means something. Where lighting a candle changes anything.
“That’s the world I live in,” she says. “Most of us do.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“It can be. You know, if I could buy into all of this - religion - I really would. I think I’d be happier if I had some way to invent hope.”
“If it means anything, it’s hard to stay … bought in when you’re out of inventions.” She wonders if this is the cost of religiosity, doubling down in the face of hopeless fact, or if this is his doubt speaking again. Maybe both. “My, ah, own mum doesn’t go to church.”
“Really?”
Since they first spoke about his family, she had imagined Mrs Bridgerton as a staunch believer, sitting in the pews to proudly attend her son’s every sermon.
“Really.” He sets the pan and sieve aside, finally, and raises his mug against hers in a silent toast. His thumb runs over the rim of his cup. Taps against the enamel for a moment while he searches for the right words. “Actually, after my father passed, she started this tradition of Sunday brunch. It’s a very grand, family affair. She’s very devout about it. I think that’s her new religion.”
“Sounds quite intense.”
“Oh, it’s about the same as your standard sermon,” he shrugs. “Three hours long, some excessive lecturing on one’s life choices, and not enough wine.” Kate laughs. “Attendance is actually mandatory, but I found the singular loophole that spares me going.” He smiles to himself. “I think my sister Eloise is an inch away from converting so she can get out of it too.”
She smiles at the mention of a sibling. “What’s stopping her?”
“Aside from the fact she wouldn’t last a week in a convent without nicotine? Probably the sexism in the clergy. Also there’s the issue of not believing in God.”
“Doesn’t sound like an issue to me.”
“No,” he says, “It isn’t.” He tilts his head in thought. “Eloise reminds me a lot of you, actually.”
“Oh?”
She isn’t quite sure if the comparison to a rebellious teenager counts as a compliment or a rebuke.
“It’s a good thing. Very good.” He smiles. “She challenges me, you know. A lot of my siblings do, but I think she tests my faith most.”
“Is that a roundabout way of calling her troublesome?” Kate asks.
Is that a roundabout way of calling me too great a test? Kate wonders. For all her certainty - for all his lack - she is not here to cast further doubt upon a man who, by his own admission, carries it by the handful. She is here for good company. A decent cuppa. Anything else - well, she won’t let herself hope.
“No,” he shakes his head, chasing away her worry in an instant. “I think it’s my way of saying she’s thoughtful. Inquisitive. Reminds me of questions I already thought I knew the answers to.”
She sips her tea and hums, pleased, eyeing Anthony as another question forms in her mind.
“Do you ever miss it?”
“Sorry?”
“Your family. The brunches. The Sundays spent arguing about nonsense. You talk about it like you love it.”
“I don’t, ah, I don’t really know.”
It’s here, for the first time, that she recognises he is outright lying.
Kate lifts her cup, reminds him of the oath they made over their first brew. “Honesty, Anthony.”
He sighs, hands falling flat on the counter. Opaque fingers of steam from his mug of chai reach toward his chin, their touch just shy of his skin.
“I think I’ve avoided it for so long,” he says haltingly, “that I forgot how much I missed it. How much it hurts. How good it feels.”
“Yeah.”
Her reply feels small and strange, like the word has come from some separate corner of the room. She hardly knows whether she is agreeing or asking a question, but she knows what he is telling her. That this - that the humanity of it all - hurts.
“When he … my father, I - I took care of my family for a few years. But after all that, I isolated myself for a while.”
“You became a priest.”
You invited me in for tea.
“I know, it’s a fairly social profession.” His lips twist, a little wry. “But as it turns out, seminary can be awfully lonely. When it comes down to you and God.”
“Did you find that disappointing?”
“Sometimes I think I found it a relief.”
“I understand,” Kate says, fingers curling over the edge of the counter.
And she does, she thinks. There’s safety in separation. In keeping oneself at arm’s length from those one loves. Spares them - spares her - somehow.
“I think I do better at a distance,” Anthony tells her.
Does this look like distance to him? Is she a faraway figure, already receding in his vision as she stands still before him? Miracle or mirage, just a shape of a woman, hazy as heat shimmering off the pavement in summer.
His words bely his actions. Because he has invited her into his home, time and again. Because his hand is on the counter, pinky inching closer to hers. No - this is not distance. It is anything but.
It is nearly, dangerously, almost - something else.
For several weeks they establish a certain choreography to their conversations. A little flirtation, a hint of honesty, a side-step when it becomes a bit too salacious. Too serious.
All the while, the leaves turn - yellow to orange to ochre. All the while, life goes on - Kate’s ledgers are unbalanced and balanced again; Edwina is entrenched in churning out weekly essays for her latest tutorials; Mary is picking up more late shifts at A&E. If there is time for Kate’s family to notice her increased absences, the lengthening periods in her responses to texts, the curtailing of her last-minute visits, well - they make little mention of it and don’t ask questions when they do.
“Maybe she’s got a boyfriend,” Mary whispers once after dinner on a Monday. Kate has cleared the table, absconded to the kitchen and left her family to speculate about her whereabouts from a room away. But her quiet voice still carries, is not muffled well-enough by the sound of running water and dishes clinking in her daughter’s hands.
“Maybe she’ll bring him home soon,” Mary says.
Edwina shushes her mother, giggling. “Can you imagine?”
Kate certainly can’t.
The only people who know where she is are Sophie and Alice, who regard her decision with a sort of passive confusion. One part intrigue and one part concern.
“We’re just … wondering what you’re doing with him. Long term, you know?”
“Making a friend,” Kate tells them, because that much is true. And really, there isn’t much else to say, no plain way to say that what they share feels entirely undefinable, beyond the realm of basic understanding. It is neither calculable nor rational. It is something cosmic. Simply put, it is something spiritual.
Anthony invites her over most nights. Kate invites herself when she has an idle afternoon on her hands. It becomes an easy routine, as familiar as it is fresh. She likes finding him by the door wearing a wide smile and a soft sweater, the sleeves rolled. The space she shares with him feels pure and untouched. Every room they inhabit in the rectory, removed from real life, more real than anything she’s ever known.
Most evenings, they find themselves trading childhood trivia over chai or exchanging double entendres as they empty a bottle of wine. On sunny days, they pace the churchyard without purpose, wandering through a maze of wild grass and weeds. After a while, they sit on a bench and discuss their favourite flavours of crisps and the concept of an afterlife and what they’re watching on television lately.
“Taskmaster.”
Naturally.
“As Time Goes By.”
“Sorry?” Her brows have done a disappearing act into her hairline. “That Judi Dench one from the nineties?”
He grins. “Yeah. That one.”
Other afternoons, when the earth is soft from a morning shower, he takes her to his garden. Those hours are her favourite.
She sinks her hands into soil by his side, unconcerned with the dirt that sticks itself beneath her fingernails. He shows her how to dig up rows of tulips, how to protect their bulbs before the frost sets in. In the kitchen, they pack the buds in pots and place them in the wine cellar. For a few weeks, they tend to them in the dark, preparing the plants to grow on a windowsill in the midst of an infertile winter.
As the world turns to rot, they take root, blooming as the trees turn barren and leaves crunch underfoot. What was once green has gone umber, shriveled and slipped to the deadened garden floor.
But inside - inside, the world is warm.
Anthony gives her the first flowers born in the walls of the rectory when she stops by some Saturday in November, their tender stems tied with twine. The tulips’ purple and pink-tipped petals are satin between her fingers, sweet beneath her nose.
Kate thanks him and he says that it’s nothing, that she’s the one who spent weeks keeping them alive anyway.
“I didn’t do it alone,” she tells him.
On the first of December, with a fresh fistful of flowers deposited in a vase on the kitchen counter, Kate and Anthony sit side-by-side in the bathroom, legs tucked beneath their bodies. There is a pane of stained glass between them on the tile floor, torn from the wall above the clawfoot tub.
For an indeterminate number of minutes, they work in quiet unity, cutting out a few cracked panes and replacing them with unblemished shards of blue glass. She watches him mend the mosaic with little care for the clock, no sense of urgency to return to the invoices and ledgers back at home waiting to be processed and balanced.
Time is not a measurable entity when it is shared with Anthony. Cannot be tallied or tracked or torn in half. It is one of the things she enjoys most about being here with him. The minutes stretch like hours, dripping slow and sweet as the honey he stirs into her tea. She spends what might be seconds or minutes or months tracking how his hands work over the fragile glass, taking account of the rest of him, too.
His fingers.
Nimble and precise, hosting a silver ring on his smallest finger. She knows how it feels on her skin now. On her hand and shoulder and knee. She wants to know what it feels like behind her back, between her teeth, against her throat.
His arms.
Those fabulous fucking forearms. Always exposed by the folded sleeve of a sweater. Dotted with dark, downy hair. Far too toned to belong to a priest. And his biceps. His shoulders. Never seen, but she knows that they’re firm beneath her palm, sturdy when they wind their limbs together and hug goodbye.
His neck.
Gorgeous in its slope and shape and faint freckling. Beautiful, when a muscle jumps beneath the skin. It is where he smells strongest of warm amber and smoke, where she wishes most to press her nose. Where she imagines she might drag her tongue over his pulse.
Once the section of splintered glass is extracted, Anthony lifts the swatch to the light. Sunbeams find his features in fragments, a portrait of damaged glory. Looking at him like this, Kate realises that she might love a priest in pieces.
Together, they return the repaired window to its rightful place. A burst of daylight comes through the stained glass as Kate notches it into frame, decorating her face with a flush of colour.
“Beautiful,” Anthony says, looking at her with something akin to awe. Looking at her like she so often looks at him, with more than mere wanting.
Her finger slips on the sill and the glass wavers in its frame. His hands reach for the other side, steadying the piece.
“Careful now.”
“You were in my prayers last night.”
“Likewise. Father.”
He lets her call him that now and again, laughs every time like he knows it turns her on just to say it.
“Really?” he asks, a sly smile lifting the corners of his lips.
“Really,” she repeats.
Dreams count as prayers, don’t they? Both are, in essence, a form of wish fulfillment. And God, how she wishes. For his fingers in her mouth. For his arms banded around her back. For his neck bowed above her body and his mouth trailing over her breasts, between her knees. For his tongue -
“Are you alright?”
“Oh, sure,” she says airily, like she wasn’t just imagining a priest’s face in her cunt. “Just … thinking.”
A shiver rushes through her. It has little to do with the snowflakes floating through the churchyard.
He taps a finger on her temple. “What’s on your mind?”
“Are you a virgin?” she blurts out.
He coughs, the air turning white around his ruddy cheeks. “Why on earth would you ask that?”
“Well, there’s that bit about the vow of celibacy.”
“Kate, I took that vow when I was twenty-two.”
“Right. And now you’re twenty-nine.”
“And?”
“And I’m sure there are plenty of gorgeous, twenty-nine year old virgins out there.”
“Gorgeous, you say.” He preens a little at that.
She swats his shoulder. “Pride is an ugly colour on you, Father.”
He looks like he is going to say something clever in return, something sinful, maybe. But he swallows it.
“Sure it is,” he says, humouring her.
“So.” Kate tries again. “About your virginity.”
“Long gone.”
“And this vow of celibacy.”
“Steadfast.” Anthony sighs, leaning back against the bench and stretching his legs out onto the frost-tipped lawn.
“No seven year itch?”
He narrows his eyes, turns his head away from where it was tipped near the notch of her neck, that patch that is particularly perfumed with the scent of lilies.
“No comment.”
“Some priests can get married, you know,” she says casually. Of course he knows.
“Not this one.”
His certainty surprises her.
“What if you want to one day?”
There must be some slim chance. Surely, if he’s following in his father’s footsteps -
“I won’t.” His tone is clipped, the click of a closed door.
Kate rattles at the handle anyway.
“But what if you do.”
He huffs a laugh at her persistence.
“Then I suppose that would be rather complicated, since I’m married to the Church.”
“Mm,” Kate nods. “Quite difficult to compete with God.”
His response is quick and quiet, as if only for himself. “Not as difficult as you’d think.”
Her breath catches. She shifts closer to him on the bench so she can feel the heat of his hip against hers.
“What would you do if you liked someone?”
“I would buy them expensive tea and give them tulips and tell them they’re in my prayers.”
Gaze unwavering from her face, he says it all with his arm sliding high across the back of the bench. Not touching her. But near enough to it. And her heart races.
She moves closer, leans into him. He does not lean away. Their thighs are flush now.
“And what would you do if you loved someone?”
He closes his eyes for a moment and his hand falls to rest heavy on her knee.
“We’re not going to have sex,” he says, releasing a soft exhale through his nose.
Kate laughs, breathless and off-kilter. His response is not the standard side-step in their dance. It is both an acknowledgement and a denial. It is destabilising.
Through it all, his hand stays steady on her leg.
“Okay,” she tells him.
She won’t last a week.
Six days later, he comes by the cafe.
When the last patron is ushered out and the wintry sun sinks below the windowsill, Kate starts stacking chairs and collecting crumbs and praying to Saint Anthony for a little sanity. Some small portion of self-restraint to keep her from seeking out a man whom she cannot have.
“Kate.”
Her name rings out as the bell above the entrance chimes. She turns to find Anthony, breathless in a black shirt and trousers, as though he has walked straight from the pulpit to her door.
His presence ought to be proof that prayer is pointless. Temptation has been delivered to her doorstep and she has a great few defences. But even so. She is all too glad, all too awed to see him for it to be anything but divined. That the man she prayed to - prayed for - is standing right in front of her. A Catholic Priest with his half-done collar, looking at her like she is something whole. He almost makes her believe in something good, better than she has allowed herself to hope for.
She fights the urge to want. To wish.
“We’re closed.”
Her focus turns to the pastry case, where she feigns great investment in the remaining inventory of stale tarts and deflated morning buns.
“You’re avoiding me.”
He doesn’t ask why. Simply states the apparent.
“For good reason, Father,” she says, facing him.
“I know that.” He nods, stepping closer. “I know.”
She swallows hard, throat working over all the words that can’t quite make it out of her mouth. It is difficult to think clearly with him in such close proximity. Difficult to hide just how desperately she desires him now. She shakes her head to clear the fog.
“You need to go,” she tells him, readying herself to retreat behind the counter. “I need to -”
“Kate. Please, just… wait.”
His hand circles her wrist. A thumb strokes over her skin, like it is second nature. He touches her deliberately. Delicately. Not as though she might break, but as if he is handling the creaky teeth of a piano, something tender and out of tune.
“I miss you.” Her eyes shut at the admission. She hates how good it is to hear, how it warms her down to the bone. “It’s unfair, I know, but -”
“I can’t be your friend.”
“You’re all I can think about.”
They speak at the same time. All the air is sucked from the room. All the sound, too. There is nothing but feeling - a burning in her chest and a flame licking at her wrist.
“We can have sex,” she says finally. Her voice is hoarse. “I know you priests have your vows, but you could do that. If you actually wanted to. You won’t burst into flames.”
It’s an awful, unwise thing to say. Selfish, she thinks. Something she never is. Tries not to be, at least. But she can see how much he aches for it - feels that hunger herself. And it almost seems a small mercy to say it for the both of them, to voice what he says he does not - cannot - want.
“I can’t have sex with you, Kate,” he says, hand flexing around her wrist, “because I will fall in love with you. And I won’t burst into flames but, my life will …” Anthony swallows thickly. “I will be wrecked.”
He says that like she isn’t already.
She meets him in the churchyard the following night and talks to him as though they are merely friends. Nothing more.
She doesn’t last an hour.
“So, what’s God's plan for you?”
They are back on the same bench as before.
“I believe God means for me to guide people. To tend to them through more than platitudes. Through more than prayer and poetry. I’m meant to be a man of action, who nurtures people as a Father. Like my father.”
He speaks in absolutes, but there’s a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. His doubt is inherent, obvious as it tries to hide.
“You’re meant to be a father?” Kate repeats.
“Yeah,” he says, an attempt at sounding resolute.
“Well. We can arrange that,” she tells him, wry.
It wouldn’t be awful to see him hold a baby. Wouldn’t be the worst thing to practise creating one.
Anthony laughs, catching her meaning, and attempts to steer her away from the subject.
“A father of many.”
“Could you settle for two?”
“Not going to happen.” He clicks his tongue.
“How about three?” she counters, insistent in her game.
“Remember, my father had eight,” Anthony says, finally playing along.
“Too many.” She taps her chin. “I’ll go up to four.”
“Alright, then.” He flicks his wrist like a magic trick: three fingers turned four. “Four it is.”
That move alone might have just gotten her pregnant. Immaculate conception, indeed.
“Should we shake on it?” Kate asks, extending a hand.
He shakes his head like he can hardly believe her. Can hardly lie to himself anymore. His thumb is moving on the back of her hand again, drawing small patterns on the skin. A familiar spark spreads through her veins.
“We’re going to have sex, aren’t we?” At once, his words are a little despondent, a little delighted. Like the realisation is a welcome defeat. Like the conclusion is forgone, fated.
Though the decision seems predestined, though it is Anthony who says so, Kate cannot help but almost feel sorry for him. If it weren’t for her, she wonders, would he accept such a thing so easily? Would he eventually abandon his vows? In a moment like this, she isn’t sure whose voice is loudest in his head: hers or God’s or the doubt. In a moment like this, she isn’t sure if any of them sound the same.
Just as the words are formed on her tongue, just as she nearly tells him, “We don’t have to,” because she adores him as he is, because she has never had with anyone what she has with him, because if she can’t have him whole, she will take half - Anthony interrupts her.
Again, he answers like he’s already heard what’s inside her head.
“Kate. I want to.”
He says it without a shred of doubt. She knows he is telling the truth.
“Hi.”
He finds her in the church, a single candle lit before her in the dark. It is a last-ditch effort to restore her self-control.
“Hi.”
She greets him with a small nod of her head. It’s strange to see him in the cassock again, standing before the altar like any priest ought to. He seems out of place. She feels out of her mind.
“What are you doing here?”
“Just fancied a proper prayer.” And a priest.
(And if the former provides some plausible deniability, well. That’s just providence.)
“I thought you were just in my head when I walked in here,” he says. “I mean you were but then you were, you know. There. Here.” He shakes his head. “I’m not making much sense am I?”
“You are, actually.”
She knows what it is to imagine him. To conjure him up so clearly in her head that she could swear he is beside her. It feels good to know he does the same.
Anthony reaches for her hand and it feels like fire, a little flicker of desire surging through her. She knows well enough now that he feels it too. He opens his mouth, on the edge of something honest.
“Can we try something?” he asks.
For a moment, she thinks he might ask to kiss her. Instead, he guides her away from the altar and toward the confessional.
Kate crosses her arms. “How does this work?”
“You go in there.” He points to one side. “And I go in there.”
“And you make me tell you all my sins.”
“No. You tell me what's weighing on your heart and I listen without judgment, and in complete confidence.”
“Sounds dangerous.” She chews on her cheek as she considers the offer. “You go first.”
Inside, separated by a flimsy panel of pine, Anthony tells her how to lead him into confession.
“Alright. You asked me what my purpose is the other night. And honestly, Kate? I don’t know. I just made up an answer that felt right. It feels like that’s all I do here.” He laughs to himself a little. “I’m nearly thirty and all I’ve ever wanted is to make my father proud. I deferred my life the day he died. Dropped out of uni and devoted myself to my family and … and the moment they didn’t need me anymore, I went to seminary because I need … I need to be needed. And I need to believe that there’s somewhere I’ll see him again, even if no one else buys it. I always thought that if - if I could be needed and not known, then I’d be safe. I wouldn’t have to lose anyone again.”
A long silence stretches between them. Kate isn’t sure if confession is a conversational sort of thing, so she stays quiet. Waits for him to tell her what comes next.
“Kate?” he whispers hesitantly, like he isn’t sure she’s still there.
“I’m here.”
“I think it scares me sometimes. How much I find myself needing you. How much it feels like you know me.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. So she starts with the truth.
“I lie. Not a lot. Or maybe it is? You’d be a better judge of that. Always little things. Like when someone asks how I’m doing or what I want or why I’m spending all my time with a priest.” She pauses. “I lie to myself. Say that I’m not frightened or feel like an absolute fuck-up. But I am. Frightened. Of failing my family. Of letting someone get close enough to see everything that’s wrong in me. Of thinking it’s safe enough to hope - that I’m worthy of wanting something good. Something for myself.” She twists her fingers in her lap, watches the knuckles blanch. “But if it means anything, I never lie when I’m with you.”
“It does. It means something,” he says softly. She can hear him breathing - a long, shuddering inhale - before he speaks again. “Can you tell me what you want, Kate? Right here, right now.”
“I think I just want someone to tell me I’m good. That I’m doing good. That I’m not a mistake.” Though he can’t see her, she’s never felt more exposed. And now - now that she has let herself start, she cannot stop, cannot quiet the greed of a good wish. “I want someone to tell me that they want me. Not just need me, but want me. Without wondering why. So just … could you just fucking tell me that you want me? That it isn’t illogical and that you aren’t ashamed of it? I want you to tell me what you want.”
Anthony pulls back the curtain of the confessional. His hair is in disarray, no doubt the doing of his own nervous fingers.
“Kneel,” he whispers hoarsely. “I want you to kneel.”
She sinks to the floor without question and his hand stretches forward and finds her face. Her breathing settles at the sensation. Maybe that’s it. Maybe this whole time she has been pleading with saints in a search for something, she has actually been asking to be found.
Kate looks up at him, waiting for instruction. Waiting for what comes next.
Anthony offers no words but he bends before her, kneels with Kate on the stone floor so he is made her equal. He continues to caress her face. Runs his knuckles over the crest of her cheek, dips a thumb in the cleft of her chin, traces the seam of her mouth. His own mouth moves closer. His breath blows soft against her lips. He is perilously close to kissing her.
In the wake of their confessions, his humanity is clarified at close range. The fine lines and fear in his eyes. The unbridled desire caught in the pink curve of his mouth. The ruined collar above his cassock.
When they first met, his piety was at odds with his provocations in a way that inspired intrigue. A little excitement. Now, all his dissonance feels dire.
“Do you see me, Kate?” His voice is rough with longing, a little desperate as he asks. “Do you see what you do to me?”
“I do.”
Her hand covers his cheek now. He shuts his eyes for a moment, simultaneously satisfied and overwhelmed by the weight of such recognition.
“Kate.” He says her name and it sounds like absolution. “I want you,” he whispers, mouth inching closer, “and it isn’t a mistake.”
His kiss is a benediction, the invocation of something miraculous and magnificent.
She sighs into his open mouth. “Anthony.”
His hand traces the line of her clavicle, stuttering as it breaches the border of her collar and slips against her skin. Their tongues tangle together as he touches her, gentle and probing at first, then furious as a fire. They are indiscriminate in their desire as the flames spread, with hands weaving into one another’s hair, spare fingers grasping at shoulders.
He buries his face in her neck. Holds her close. Breathes her in. “That scent,” he says, dragging his nose over her skin. His tongue follows. “You smell like heaven. Always.”
“It's lilies,” she tells him, more than a little delirious.
“Lilies,” he repeats. “I'm planting those next.”
And then he is planting his mouth on hers, tongue threaded with hers, exactly where it ought to be. They stand up together, lips still locked together and his arms wound like wisteria behind her back. She starts taking fistfuls of his cassock, trying to tug it upward and undo his belt underneath.
It's a lot.
“What the - fuck,” she grunts, tugging at the black cloth, fumbling for his belt. “This is a skirt and trousers?”
“Sorry,” he says.
But he isn’t. He’s laughing a little, and God, the sound - the sensation of his smile, sweet against her lips - makes her ache. Even though he finds her frustration funny, she can find no fault in it. She wants him too much for words, wants him in too many ways.
He steps back a little, removes the robes with a practiced ease. His belt, too. She reaches for him again, one hand in his hair and another in his mouth. Her thumb presses past his lips and taps at his teeth, slithering into the space beside her tongue as she kisses him again.
His arms brace her back, lift her so she is propped up against the side of the confessional. Her legs wrap around his waist, grinding and grappling. Trapped between the weak wood of the booth and the hard line of his body, Kate has never felt more unrestrained. She kisses Anthony with abandon, lets her teeth tug at his lips and graze over the column of his throat.
He groans gorgeously, huffing harsh breaths at her every touch, and slides a hand beneath the hem of her shirt. His fingers are searing against her bare body, spreading wildfire over her skin. She whines as he unclasps her bra and drags a slow hand beneath a loosened cup to rasp over her hard nipple. Her hips rock against his, chasing the delicious friction that is growing against her core.
“Are you going to fuck me here?” she asks, a little delirious. She thinks she might go insane if he doesn’t.
Though his hand remains on her breast, Anthony draws his head back. He stares at her. Kate stares back.
He slips his hand out from under her shirt, stumbles back a bit. Her stomach turns in an instant. Maybe he’s realised that she is a mistake. Maybe he will run out of the chapel without a second glance, tormented with terrible regret. Maybe she will never see him again.
But his hand returns to her waist. His lips to her lips. And then he is carrying her, one hand on her arse and another sliding up her spine, positioning her to lie back on the church’s first pew.
He undresses her slowly, reverently. Every inch of uncovered skin is bestowed with a kiss or the flick of his tongue, until she is naked and writhing against the deep-set seat of the bench. He stands quickly, grabbing the discarded cassock and folding it to fit beneath her head.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
“More than,” she nods. “But -” she props herself up on her elbows, runs a hand over his chest. “I want to see you.”
Anthony obliges, opening the buttons of his shirt so his torso is entirely exposed. She traces her fingers along the hard lines of his body, flutters them over the soft hair that covers his chest and trails his stomach, the rest of it hiding behind the waistband of his trousers. His muscles clench at the slow graze of her fingertips and she takes pride in the sensation, revels in the sound of his sigh, shuddering as a breath of wind that soughs through the branches in the cottage courtyard.
Her hand falls to his trousers, palming at the bulge that presses against the cloth. His fingers circle her wrist and he sucks a sharp breath between his teeth.
“Kate,” he huffs, eyes screwed shut. “Not yet. I need to taste you first.”
She moans at the request and her frustration melts into easy acquiescence. She’s dreamed of him tasting her too.
He lowers himself to the floor, kneeling now as a supplicant instead of an equal, and starts stroking her sex slowly. An awed groan reverberates against her thigh as his fingers slide easily through her slick.
“Fuck, Kate,” he sighs and sticks his fingers in his mouth. “Are you always like this?”
“Always with you,” she confesses, looking down at him through heavy-lidded eyes.
He presses a spit-damp digit into her tight channel, adds another. Exhales a ragged breath as her walls clench around him.
“Anthony,” she moans, her voice gritty with need.
Still pumping his fingers inside her, Anthony lowers his head and noses at her cunt, splitting the seam of her. A flick of his tongue brushes her clit just so, not quite enough. But she bucks beneath him anyway, begs for him to give her more.
“Please,” she whines, twisting a hand in his curls and tugging at the root.
He lifts his brows and tilts his head, offers a fox-like smile from between her parted thighs. His teeth gleam in the dark and there’s a bit of shine to his nose, the bridge glistening with her arousal.
“Whatever you want, Kate,” he tells her.
She wonders if this will be a constant - the way he says her name, reverent and repeating.
“Kathani,” she sighs, shuddering at the crook of his thick fingers twisting inside her. “You can call me Kathani.”
It seems this particular permission is all he needs, his mouth suctioning over her cunt with fervor now. She jolts as his lips wrap around her clit, back bowing off the pew like a woman possessed.
She cries out his name and he calls hers in return, says it as chant.
“Kathani,” he rasps against her thigh. “Kathani.” The sound is swallowed by her cunt as he sinks his digits in deeper and his tongue licks hot, firm stripes with the flat of his tongue.
He works over her clit with care, finally - finally - doing more than teasing. Anthony takes his time, takes her apart like it is an act of worship. Puts her back together like he is taking communion, drinking of her body until he is made full, made holy by the divine grace of her cunt.
Her pleasure is mounting and he does not retreat. Devours her as she fucks herself onto his face and fingers, moaning and murmuring encouragement against her cunt when he is not focussed on suckling at her clit. Kate gasps sharply, nearly sobs as she reaches her release, her body alight and cunt crying out for more. For his hands and lips and cock.
Through it all he is attentive, catching her when she falls. Fingers and mouth still tending to her as she returns to her body, shuddering and sensitive at his touch. When he finally pulls away he looks at her like he has been purified, lips parted and pupils blown wide with wonder.
After Anthony has licked his fingers clean, she presses his face between her trembling hands and drags him upward. Nose-to-nose, she tilts her head, drops a kiss to the tip of his. Her lips come away damp. He kisses them.
It is a kiss that he means to be brief, but Kate captures his lips more deeply. A moan falls from his mouth and rattles in her throat. She can taste herself on him, musk and sweat and something sweet. She needs more. Her tongue weaves into his mouth as she eases him up from the floor and frees him from his remaining costume.
They are both naked now. He is beautiful as he stands before her bathed in the pale glow of moonlight, back lit with the glow of her candle, still burning on the altar. She marvels up at his muscled arms and thick thighs, his heavy cock carved from marble. He fists himself and she desperately wants to replace his hand with her own, take him into her mouth and swallow him down. But there’s no time now that Anthony steps closer, covers her body with his own.
He bears down over her beautifully. Crushed beneath his chest, she welcomes the weight of him, the way he steals the air from her lungs. She wants him. Desperately. Dangerously. Wishes she could have him here, like this, forever.
This wanting burns away in her like wax, like she has been lit by a holy heat. She would walk with him into fire if he asked. The thought startles her briefly - that she is wholly consumed by him, would like to be. The force of her own desire in the wake of his touch ought to be a terrifying thing. Instead, it feels a freeing one.
Her hands clutch at his back and hair, drawing him close so there is nowhere else to go except inside her. Anthony drags his nose along her neck and inhales heavily, suckles at the sensitive spot behind her ear.
“God, you consume me, Kathani,” he groans, unaware what that word does to her. Consume. “That smell.” He pants against her neck, warm air blooming on her skin. “Lilies.”
He presses heated kisses along her cheek, licks at her jaw and exposed throat. A hand cups the underside of her breast, massages the flesh firm enough to force a soft moan from her mouth. A responding sigh falls from his parted lips and she licks against them, eases her tongue inside to slide against his. Her head is swimming, body buzzing like she might be drunk. Inebriated by Anthony alone. They kiss until her lips are nearly numb, bruised and bitten and tenderly tugged between teeth.
Lower, his cock rests heavy on her cunt, tip teasing the swollen seam, catching on her entrance with every slow drag of his hips. Like he wants to but he can’t, a hesitant hand raised and hovering, not able to knock upon a door.
“We don’t have to,” she says, a gentle hand on his jaw. Even now, she knows what his vows mean to him. “I will stop.”
“Kathani.” He says her name like it breaks his heart. It hurts and heals hers too. “Do not stop.”
And then he is pressing into her, hot and heavy and slow as he stretches her open, splits her wider than she thought possible.
She gasps at the fullness of him, breath caught in her throat. Overwhelmed and nearly choking as he sheathes himself further inside her, she struggles to settle, to breathe. Anthony’s eyes are sewn shut as he moves deeper and she traces a finger over his lids, presses into the divot above his brows until he blinks his eyes open again.
Finally, he is seated inside her fully, notched to the hilt so they are of one flesh. Looking into his eyes, she feels like she can see inside him. Feels that she could reach into his head and pluck out their shared thoughts. That if she reaches inside his chest and roots around the bones, she will find her heart there too, his soul the same as hers. It must have been divine intervention that brought her here, all those weeks ago, she thinks. There is no other explanation for how perfectly their bodies fit together, how heavenly it feels to have his cock settled inside her.
She binds her hands around his bicep and back, indulges in the feel of his taut muscle and hot skin beneath her fingers. Scrapes her teeth over the flesh of his forearm braced beside her head as he fucks her. Of course a priest is taking her in a church pew in fucking missionary. His dick presses deeper and Kate groans. The sex is so good she doesn’t even laugh at the errant thought.
Her hands clutch at his skin, a plea for him to go harder, faster, but he does not comply. She is burning from the inside out, a fire catching and coursing through her veins at the slow drag of his cock. Kate arches against him and licks deeply into his mouth as he spreads her legs wider, lifts one with a hand beneath her knee. She keens at the burn of her muscles as he buries himself impossibly deeper.
Though he snaps his hips sharply and she scrapes her nails along his back, it is not a strictly carnal act. As he ruts against her with harsh thrusts, he runs a gentle hand up her side, the heels of his palm dragging over her hips and waist. His fingertips trace her ribs, trailing down over the bone, something close to devotion in his touch.
A church pew was never what she imagined for them, but she finds it as good a place to fall as any. They could build another altar here, she thinks. A shrine to their bodies and the music they make together. Skin slapping, the slick slide of cock and cunt, and their mingled moans echo like a hymn.
“Oh, Christ. Fuck,” he groans, repeating blasphemies again and again.
God is on his breath and Kate catches it in hers. She tips her head back as he sighs the word into her mouth. Their union is not sacrilege, but a sacrament. There is nothing to be undone now, no particular prayer to unwind his hand from her waist or divorce her cunt from his cock. No need to confess what she is doing now, will do again if he lets her.
She tightens around him and he trembles. So she does it again. Once more. Each time, he turns a little less restrained, a little more reckless. She does this until he is fucking into her in earnest, muscles rippling with his every thrust. She wants to be fucked full of him, baptised and born again, at the mercy of his cock.
A relieved sob is ripped from her throat as he hits a sweet spot inside her. He pounds into her perfectly, over and over again until her body pitches forward from the bench, her climax creeping in. Just as she peaks, they are plunged into shadow. A wisp of smoke billows from the altar, the candle she lit long ago now extinguished. Neither of them notice.
Anthony fucks her through her release, his open mouth hovering over hers and capturing her every exhalation. She kisses him again in the dark.
“You’re good, Kathani,” he whispers against her lips, chanting as he comes. “You’re so good.”